The Moon by Night
LC Class PZ7.L5385 Mo. | | |
Preceded by | Meet the Austins | |
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Followed by | The Young Unicorns |
The Moon by Night (
Plot summary
In The Moon by Night (
The family's adventures show its differences from contemporary society. Along the way, they meet a teenage gang in Tennessee, help rescue children from a flood in Texas, and find an abandoned baby at a campsite in Utah. Vicky's younger sister Suzy grows emotionally during the trip, from wanting to adopt a fawn near the beginning to her later swift and competent rendering of first aid when another child is injured, despite wrong-headed demands by nearby adults. They see bears several times, and though they always act properly, their peers sometimes do not, with dangerous results. They also encounter anti-U.S. sentiment in a campground in Canada and intimations of the Cold War throughout their journey.
Early in the trip, at a Tennessee campground, Vicky meets
Observing Zachary's paleness and shortness of breath during an interpretive hike in
Late in the trip, at
Major characters
- Vicky Austin — The heroine of the Austin family series of novels and stories, Vicky is the first person narrator of this book and others. Fourteen years old at the time of the novel, Vicky is beginning to assert her independence from her family, going off by herself to think, questioning her religious upbringing and other attitudes, and learning, through travel and her conversations with Zachary, that the world is much bigger and more diverse than she previously encountered in her sheltered life with her family in rural Thornhill, Connecticut.
- John Austin — Vicky's scientifically minded older brother, John, has graduated early from high school at approximately age 17, and has been accepted at M.I.T. He is primarily interested in astrophysics. John is intellectually curious and philosophical, generally loyal and kind-hearted. However, he has a low tolerance for Zachary.
- Suzy Austin — Generally considered the beauty of the family, Suzy "has wanted to be a doctor ever since she could talk." At age eleven, she already knows more about first aid than many adults, and puts this knowledge to use without fuss or panic. Suzy is fond of animals, and keeps lists of species encountered on the trip.
- Rob Austin — The youngest of the Austin children, Robert Austin is curious and loving, with a penchant for insightful questions and unintentional wordplay. Madeleine L'Engle has acknowledged that Rob is based on her own youngest child, Bion Franklin.
- Dr. Wallace Austin, or "Wally", is the father of the four Austin children, and elder brother of Douglas Austin, an artist. Their mother died when Douglas was born, and their father also died early. Wallace is a "country doctor" in general practice, who also does research when he can. As of The Moon by Night, he has temporarily turned his practice over to another doctor so he can spend a year conducting research at a New York City hospital.
- Victoria Austin, Vicky's mother and namesake, is the daughter of Reverend Eaton, a popular minister who also spent time as a missionary in Africa. Victoria attended boarding school in Switzerland, where she met her best friend Elena, who eventually marries Douglas Austin. Victoria briefly sang professionally, and an album was made of her songs. She met Wallace Austin while singing to injured soldiers at a Veterans Administration hospital.
- Zachary Gray — Student. Extremely affluent but directionless, Zachary, a student who was recently "kicked out" of Hotchkiss, vacillates between his desires for redemption and self-destruction. Charming, exciting, unpredictable and emotionally needy, Zach brings out both the best and worst in Vicky. Zachary shows a strong interest in anthropologyand is quite knowledgeable on the subject, but rejects it as a possible profession because "there's no money in it." He has a damaged heart as the result of rheumatic fever, but refuses to see any more doctors and is not sure there is any point in trying to stay alive in a troubled world.
Themes
The novel touches on such themes as the fear of human annihilation, especially nuclear annihilation; the then-imminent changes in sex roles; the power of America; the question of whether human beings are basically good or evil; and the existence or non-existence of God.
Although the chronology of Madeleine L'Engle's Austin family and Murry-O'Keefe books places the events of The Moon by Night decades later, the concerns of the narrative itself are very much of the Cold War era. Vicky refers to fallout shelters, Duck and cover, and, indirectly, to the involvement of Oak Ridge, Tennessee in the Manhattan Project. On several occasions Vicky expresses fear and dismay about the precarious situation in her world.
Beyond these, the major theme and conflict of the story is Vicky's adolescent struggle to establish her own identity as distinct from that of her family, reconciling her existing loyalties with her growing need for independence.[2] As she states in chapter 8: "You have to go off by yourself or you must stop being you, and after all I was just beginning to be me." Having spent her childhood as a happy member of a large family,[1] the fourteen-year-old has recently come to feel that her family was "holding me back, keeping me from growing up and being myself."
During the Austins' stay in Laguna Beach, Zachary takes Vicky to a performance of
- The sun shall not smite thee by day,
- Nor the moon by night.
- The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil;
- He shall preserve thy soul.
Vicky takes note of the use of the psalm as a prayer in the play, just before the Nazis arrest the Frank family. Zachary also urges Vicky to accept his belief that there is no God to protect her. Yet at the end of the novel, despite her earlier ambivalence toward religion, Vicky makes her stand against Zachary's nihilism, and cries out the words of the psalm as she awaits rescue.
Awards
- Winner of Austrian State Literary Prize, 1969.
Background and context
The novel is based on a real-life camping trip made in the spring of 1959[1] by Madeleine L'Engle and her family, the Franklins, during which she first had the idea for A Wrinkle in Time.[3] Like the Austins, the Franklins took their long vacation during a period of transition between life in a Connecticut farmhouse and relocating to New York City. In her introduction to the current Laurel-Leaf paperback editions of the Austin family novels, L'Engle states: "Somebody remarked to me that the books about the Austin family might just as well be about my own family. Indeed, the Austins do a great many things that my family did...."[4] L'Engle writes about the Franklin family's camping trip in A Circle of Quiet[5] and in her foreword to the 25th Anniversary Collectors' Edition of A Wrinkle in Time.
Related works
At one point in The Moon by Night, Suzy Austin makes a joke about "tessering", and Vicky's first person narrative identifies this comment as relating to the story of
The Moon by Night takes place about two years (perhaps slightly less) after
The Austins' camping trip is said to begin in the spring before school lets out. This places the beginning of the novel shortly before the events of
Nomenclature
- Zachary's last name is spelled "Grey" in both hardcover and paperback editions of The Moon by Night, but Gray in subsequent books. In A Ring of Endless Light, Vicky describes his eyes as being "gray, the way his name is spelled" as opposed to "grey".
- The book's title is taken from the Psalm121.
References
- ^ ISBN 1-880913-31-3.
- ISBN 0-8057-8222-2.
- Farrar, Straus & Giroux. pp. viii–ix. Limited ed.
- ISBN 0-440-95776-1.
- ISBN 0-374-12374-8.